Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 21_ The Unifying Force - James Luceno [172]
Would Anakin have bonded?
What did Sekot understand about all of them that they didn’t understand about themselves?
THIRTY-SEVEN
A sudden darkness had fallen over the Vongformed cityscape.
Their lightsabers ignited—glowing blue, violet, green—the Jedi drew on the Force to propel them across the fissured and rain-slicked rooftops and balconies that dangled over what was once the Glitannai Esplanade. Piles of debris, precipitous ledges, and gaping chasms posed no obstacles for the six as they hurdled, vaulted, leapt in a race to reach the Citadel, and the Yuuzhan Vong most responsible for what Coruscant had become. Thanks to their jet packs, Captain Page’s Commandos were just managing to keep up.
Rain was falling hard and being driven every which way by fierce gusts of wind. Overhead it was no longer possible to differentiate flashes of lightning from the artificial brilliance of deadly engagements. It was impossible to distinguish between the lament of the wind and the howl of strafing starfighters; the billowing smoke from scudding storm clouds; the sizzle of fires being extinguished by the rain from the sound of laser bolts cleaving the saturated air. The booming cannonades of distant weapons might easily have been rolling thunder; the red-orange pillars on the horizon, erupting volcanoes or the glowing ejecta of plasma launchers.
For Luke, the nebulous nature of the surroundings mirrored his inner state. The darkness was coercing a commingling of disparate realities. Coruscant was fast becoming a void, a singularity into which the very fabric of life was being stretched and distorted. Was this Coruscant any longer, or was it really Yuuzhan’tar—as the original world had been at its end, when, angered by the Yuuzhan Vong’s turn to violence, the gods had robbed their children of the Force and cast them into a bottomless abyss?
“The quickest route is through the north concourse,” Mara told Judder Page when everyone had come to a halt on a puddled ledge. Rain dripped from the visors of their helmets and cascaded down the front of their biosuits. Mara was leading the combined teams from memory, though also relying on Jacen and Tahiri’s “Vongsense” to keep everyone from encountering patrols of Yuuzhan Vong warriors.
Page had his gaze fixed on the water-beaded display of a positioning unit built into the sleeve of his biosuit. “According to this, there was bridge access to the concourse.”
Mara nodded. “The Bridge of Unity. I used to have lunch in the restaurant on the lower level.”
Even with all that Coruscant had become, she sounded wistful. Luke could imagine her, thirty years earlier, frequenting the esplanade’s expensive shops and restaurants; wandering among the crowds attending the Imperial Fair; a sometime visitor to the Imperial Palace, in her guise as the Emperor’s Hand. It was the Coruscant Luke had known only from HoloNet transmissions and the occasional dramas and documentaries that had found their way to Tosche Station on Tatooine. By the time he had finally visited the capital world in person, most of the governmental district had been in ruins, following Coruscant’s liberation by New Republic forces.
But over the decades Coruscant had become his home, as Yavin had, only to have suffered a similar fate. Luke hadn’t expected to be so heartsick; but then he hadn’t expected to find Coruscant so altered—so remade—in the two years since he and Mara had left.
Mara was waving everyone back in motion.
Fifteen minutes of flat-out running brought them to the Bridge of Unity, which had lost the ornamental wirework and inscribed plaques that had earned it landmark status. Now the bridge was little more than a ferrocrete slab spanning the esplanade canyon. Lashed by the gale, vines and slimy vegetation trailed from the edges, and a shallow but fast-moving curtain of water plunged into the frothing river far below.
From the bridge’s southern abutment, the Jedi had their first unobstructed